On 3 March 2012 06:12, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
> Um...biology? (Do you seriously believe that a document can be a person? Even the US Supreme Court hasnt quite gone that far yet.)
If a book with no words, just pictures, can be a document; or a book
written on parchment or bytes rather than paper, then why not a
tattoo'd person being a book?
You might argue that their physical body was just a carrier for the
document, and that the person wasn't themselves the document. The
relationship between a person and their body isn't something with a
tidy answer, any more than the relationship between a physical book
and the abstract document it carries has an obvious perfect formal
model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records).
Your use of "seriously" suggests the idea is obviously ridiculous, but
the restrictions you'd need on 'document' would likely rule out other
more obvious documents too. Perhaps you meant HTTP document? I have a
hard time imagining an HTTP document being a person, ...
Dan
p.s.
See also http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/whatdoc.html
"Abstract: Ordinarily the word "document" denotes a textual record.
Increasingly sophisticated attempts to provide access to the rapidly
growing quantity of available documents raised questions about which
should be considered a "document". The answer is important for any
definition of the scope of Information Science. Paul Otlet and others
developed a functional view of "document" and discussed whether, for
example, sculpture, museum objects, and live animals, could be
considered "documents". Suzanne Briet equated "document" with
organized physical evidence. These ideas appear to resemble notions of
"material culture" in cultural anthropology and "object-as-sign" in
semiotics. Others, especially in the USA (e.g. Jesse Shera and Louis
Shores) took a narrower view. New digital technology renews old
questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and
meaning."